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SOCIAL ROLES AND NORMS

Project Summary

Ethnographic and historical data reveal a great diversity of economic organizations, among which market and scarcity are but one set of guidelines for our interaction with humans and non-humans.

To expand the space of possible economic models, I propose to complement the individualistic framework of decision theory with a network-based grammar of social roles: positions and relationships through which the collective guides the actions, and even the desires of its agents.

I put the emphasis on context and framing, i.e. how agents identify the situation in which they are, so as to decide what they want out of it. Starting from a minimal set of rules, I sketch out a vast array of economic worldviews, from profit-driven resource exploitation to webs of personal obligations and animistic exchange with natural entities.